OK, let’s do this: Love Goes To Buildings On Fire: Five Years In New York That Changed Music Forever (Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux) hits brick and digital bookstores on November 8, 2011. You can pre-order it now at Indiebound (support your local independent bookseller), Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and elsewhere.

It’s a book about the creative explosions in NYC’s music scenes—punk rock, hip hop, disco, salsa, jazz, classical—during some of the City’s most troubled years. It begins at the Mercer Arts Center on January 1, 1973, and ends at the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club on December 31, 1977. It’s an inspirational story about a city that’s changed a lot in thirty-plus years, but in some ways hasn’t changed at all. Dramatis personæ: Patti Smith, DJ Kool Herc, Bruce Springsteen, Miles Davis, Richard Hell, Willie Colón, Bob Dylan, Laurie Anderson, The Ramones, Arthur Russell, The New York Dolls, Grandmaster Flash, Nicky Siano, Rubén, Blades, Rashied Ali, Television, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, David Murray, Blondie, Lester Bowie, David Bowie, and many, many more.

This blog will let me share some of music, video clips, photos, stories, and other ephemera I collected over 6+ years of research, along with relevant new stuff. I hope it will enhance and extend the experience of reading the book.

For starters, check out the full wrap-around cover, drawn by former Village Voice cartoon journalist Mark Alan Stamaty . Thanks Mark; you rock.